Chris Hadfield: Early life

Chris Hadfield was born in Sarnia in Canada on the 29th of August, 1959, and was raised on a corn farm in southern Ontario. On graduating high school in 1978, Hadfield joined the Canadian Armed Forces and spent two years at Royal Roads Military College. He then studied at the Royal Military College of Canada, where he received a degree in mechanical engineering. Hadfield spent a total of 25 years in the rural Canadian Air Force, and 21 years with the Canadian Space Agency and NASA. He became the first Canadian to perform a spacewalk, and in 2013 became the commander of the International Space Station. I hope you don't mind, Chris, if we cut straight to the chase. Before we chart how you got there, take us to those first moments. 2001. You're pulling yourself out of the Endeavour and there's nothing but your spacesuit separating you from the rest of the universe beyond Earth.

Chris - It's an amazing experience, partially because of what you just described, the actual physical nature of what's happening. You're wearing a cloth balloon around your body that is carrying a little tiny bubble of just enough oxygen to keep you alive. Like you've brought a little microcosm of the Earth itself up there with you so that it can nurture you like an infant in their mother's womb, just to be able to stay alive. But it's the personal side that is really prevalent in that I had been dreaming of being an astronaut since I could remember, and definitely since I was 9 or 10. And the real personification of being an astronaut is to go outside on a spacewalk like the people on the Moon or Buck Rogers in the comic books - he wasn't just sitting in his ship all the time. He was out there doing things. So to actually be chosen and then trained and trusted to go out on a spacewalk where it's another whole level of danger and individual responsibility, it's a very rare thing. So that day you had to depressurise, you have to think about what diet you've had. You're going to be locked inside this suit for 10 hours. You're jammed into a little airlock, and there's not room for two people to be lined up. One has to be pointed one way and the other, the other way. So you're like head to toe in there and you've got this other person's feet banging into the visor of your helmet. I was the first person out. So I opened the great big metal hatch, but by then all the air's gone out of the airlock. So even though it's a metallic thing that's happening, there's no sound deadly silent. And you push that hatch out of the way and what was very confining, dark, crowded, little space. And now suddenly the entire universe is right there magically through this hole. Imagine next time you're in a toilet stall. Imagine if when you open the door of your toilet stall, if you were standing on the top of Mount Everest and then you close the door again and you go, 'how can this be on the other side of that door when I was in this familiar small space?' But you grab onto the hatch with both hands and you worm your way through it, almost like deliberately giving birth to yourself. And now suddenly you're in a whole new place with the gigantic, brilliantly coloured, textured world beside you, and then the unfathomably, huge blackness of the universe all around. It's an amazing transition.

James - You describe it so emotively and you focus on the emotion in that description, but all the while you've got a job to do. So that's something you've got to keep as in control as possible

Chris - I don't know, when a world class ballerina takes the stage, what might she be thinking about? Because the technical skills are so high for a ballerina and they have a lifetime of practice and the physically punishing nature of what they're doing. But there's also the beautiful symphonic music and there's the artistry of what's going to happen, but then there's all the mechanics of each memorised dance step - and I think there's a parallel there. Or maybe to an Olympic athlete who's going to go through their gymnastic routine or run a race. So yeah, you are very much focused on the compulsories and all of the objectives. We don't go outside recreationally. And in our case, we were building the huge robot arm, the Canadarm, onto the International Space Station. I had trained for it for years, literally for five years. So you've got all of those steps in front of you, but the overwhelming nature of the spacewalk itself and the where you are and the wonderment that comes along with it, you almost have to shake yourself to get past that so that you can focus on the absolutely necessary minutia of why you're there.

James - That incredible achievement amongst others in your life are brief snapshots of a long journey. I wonder if we could circle back and you could take us back to rural Canada in the 1960s and your memories of your early years.

Chris - My parents are farmers. They both had a high school education. In fact, they met in high school and they were both raised by farmers. But my dad's brother, one Christmas, bought him a ride in an aeroplane. One of those things where you can go for a local ride. And my father decided that's better than farming. And so he became a pilot. And so I grew up in an environment which was a combination of hard necessary physical labour of being a farmer as well as flying because my dad had aeroplanes. But what really caught my imagination was science fiction. And I voraciously read comic books and then Arthur C. Clarke and Bradbury and Asimov and all the rest. But also science fact, because interspersed with my agricultural reality and the dreams of science fiction, Yuri Gagarin flew and then Al Shepard and then the Gemini program, and then there were people going to the moon, Apollo eight on Christmas Eve went around the moon. And then the buildup to Apollo 11 and the summer that I was just about to turn 10, Mike and Neil and Buzz went to the moon, and Neil and Buzz successfully landed on the surface and got out and walked around. And that combination of growing up, hard work, aviation showing that that was possible, the dreams of fiction and the reality of what other people were doing, all of that lay down the foundations upon which I decided I'm going to try and be a pilot, be a test pilot, be an astronaut, and maybe someday do some of those amazing adventures that I've been dreaming about.

James - Amazing. So it really was a formative experience because I was at risk, I thought, of a gross oversimplification, or perpetuating a romantic ideal when trying to chart your life story. Those events and then your choices to study science were all geared towards this ambition to go to space from such a young age.

Chris - I was practical about it though, James, from the beginning. I wasn't like, if I don't fly in space, I'm a loser. Because I was Canadian, we didn't even have astronauts, we had no rockets, we had no NASA, we didn't have a space agency at the time. So the odds, they weren't just bad, the odds were zero. By definition, I could not be an astronaut as a Canadian - it didn't exist. But I knew that the only thing you can count on is that things are going to change. So I thought, 'Hey, the United States didn't used to have astronauts either, and now they do. So give it a shot.' But at each stage, I tried to make choices that were something that I wanted to do. And if that was as far as I got, that'd be okay. Like, I'm going to set my mind to be an engineer because a lot of astronauts have an engineering background, and that's a good career and there's lots of jobs I can get as an engineer. And if I count on being a pilot, well one little bit of metal in your eye and you're never going to be a pilot, again. So you can't count on something that has such tight medical requirements. So I became an engineer in university, and then I joined Air Cadets, learned to fly, became a pilot, and then became a fighter pilot, the most demanding level of being a pilot. And then test pilot school, because, to me, that combination of flying and engineering and flying some of the best aeroplanes in the world, that was just great. I would've loved to just stay as a pilot my whole life. That's a good career as an airline pilot. My dad became an airline pilot eventually and my brothers in fact. But then to be a test pilot, that was like the crème de la crème for me, the combination of all of it. There are lots of great jobs; they're dangerous but, as a test pilot, and really as I was a test pilot, there was only one other job that I would've considered a real step up for me in opportunity. And that was when I went through the selection process and, on a fateful Saturday, just a few minutes after one o'clock in the afternoon, the president of the Canadian Space Agency called me and asked if I would like to be an astronaut.